Raycom, owners of WSFA, announce layoffs as merger moves ahead

Mass layoffs often take people by surprise.
But according to Business Insider, if you look out for the signs, you may see them coming. Forewarned is forearmed!
Listen to the language top executives use. "Downsizing," "restructuring," and "streamlining" are all red flags!
If words like "pivoting" or "shifting focus" come up, your department may be getting shut down or sold. Uh oh!
And if your company is desperately trying to save its flagship product, you might be going down with the ship, too!
Wochit

Montgomery-based Raycom Media informed some employees this week that they won’t have a job once the deal after a merger is approved and finalized.

The company didn’t share specifics on the job cuts but said they effect “less than one-half of 1 percent” of the Raycom Media workforce. The announcement came three months after Raycom agreed to be purchased by Atlanta-based Gray Television in a $3.647 billion deal. More than 8,300 people worked for Raycom at the time.

“While these staff reductions will not take place until the deal is approved and closes, today we notified the corporate employees that will be impacted,” Raycom Media President and CEO Pat LaPlatney said in a statement Monday. He said employees will get “meaningful severance packages and career services assistance.”

Raycom owns or provides services for 65 television stations, including WSFA in Montgomery. Gray said it plans to save $80 million through the merger, and University of Georgia applied economics professor Jeffrey Dorfman said at the time of the deal that those savings would likely come from salary cutbacks over several years at the executive and administrative levels.

“If I was in Raycom’s Montgomery headquarters doing back-office stuff, I’d be worried,” he said,” Dorfman said at the time.

LaPlatney noted Monday that the company’s remaining Alabama presence includes “hundreds of employees across the state including our corporate office and our television stations.”

“We are committed to continuing to provide quality journalism in serving the communities of Montgomery, Birmingham, Huntsville and Dothan,” LaPlatney said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter and would create the nation’s third largest television group.

As part of the deal, Raycom agreed to sell or spin off another Montgomery company, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., which it acquired last year, as well as auto industry platform Pure Cars. CNHI owned more than 110 newspapers, websites and niche publications at the time it was acquired by Raycom.

Raycom announced last August that it was shifting some of its digital production from Montgomery to Atlanta.